


Five Times Nallie Attended a Party and One Time They Didn't; or, A Million Miles Away

by lusilly



Series: Earth-28 [26]
Category: Batman (Comics), DCU, DCU (Comics)
Genre: Adopted Children, Children of Characters, F/M, Falling In Love, Foot Fetish, Next Generation, Next-Gen, OTP Feels, Party, Power Couple
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-29
Updated: 2015-03-29
Packaged: 2018-03-20 03:41:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 13,536
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3635295
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lusilly/pseuds/lusilly
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Natalia Nayar Wayne (Tallie) is Damian's adopted daughter. Nabil Wayne is Damian's biological son by Stephanie Brown from an alternate universe. As a teenager Nabil was displaced into Tallie's world, and everything went OK until they accidentally fell in love.</p><p>This story charts the developing history of the canon-divergent AU Earth-28 framed by Nallie, who are the ruinous OTP to end all OTPs, both heirs to legacies that naturally only one of them can claim, and both bound and chained by who they are and where they stay (that is, until they choose to stay no longer).</p>
            </blockquote>





	Five Times Nallie Attended a Party and One Time They Didn't; or, A Million Miles Away

**Author's Note:**

> I know this is real heavy on alternate universe original character stuff, but you can check over at lusilly.tumblr.com/tagged/earth-28 and /tagged/nallie to get more perspective. Also check out the Earth-28 series here on Ao3.
> 
> Damian is married to Ellen Nayar, a trans woman whom he met in Gotham when he was a teenager. They have two adopted children, Natalia Nayar Wayne (aka Tallie) and Richard Thomas Wayne (aka Tom). Tam Fox and Jason Todd have two daughters named Allison (Al) and Catherine, and Lian Harper and Mar'i Grayson (two of Damian's greatest friends) have a nonbinary intersex child named Tommiand'r (Tommy Grayson, Red Hood - actual canon character from Justice  
> League Generation Lost #14 btw). Sahar Shaheen (Shazam), also a character from JLGL #14, is mentioned as well.
> 
> Title partially derived from "A Million Miles Away" from the Aladdin OBC.
> 
> Warning for semi-incest I guess, but as you'll see neither Tallie nor Nabil ever considered each other siblings. A lot of the friction comes from Damian not wanting to see Nabil as his son, then using the Nabil-is-my-son excuse to try and prevent Nallie from happening haha.
> 
> (tagged as foot fetish bc fuck you rosie)

1.

            “Tallie, put your dress on.”

            Natalia Nayar Wayne, eleven years old and dressed only in a short slip and hair pinned into an intricate bun on the top of her head, peeked out the door of her mother’s bedroom. Down the hall, her father stood silent and stoic behind Dick Grayson, who spoke to the new boy gently but brightly. “Tallie,” repeated Ellen, reaching out to take her daughter’s shoulder, pull her away from the door. “Our guests will be arriving any minute now. Do you want to keep Aunt Lian waiting?”

            “Who’s that boy?” asked Tallie, but she resisted her mother’s tug, did not vacate her spot from the door.

            “That’s Nabil,” said Ellen smoothly.

            “I know his name,” said Tallie. “I want to know who he is.”

            “He’s a new friend. He’ll be living here at the Manor from now on.”

            “With us?”

            “No,” answered Ellen. Out of habit, she pulled apart and rebraided the end of her long hair again and again. It was a tell, but also a tell that she was acutely aware of, and so Tallie didn’t take it to mean much. “We’re staying in the Burroughs, farther away from the city. Nabil will be here with Baba. We won’t be far away.”

            Tallie didn’t say anything. Giving up on her braid, Ellen turned to a mirror, combing it all out with her fingers, then carefully redoing it piece by piece. Tallie cracked the door open a little more and peered out. As she watched, Dick grinned and clapped the boy on the back, and then they turned and walked down the hall. Damian grimaced, then followed them.

            A hundred questions ran through Tallie’s head. Without turning back to her mother, she asked, “Why does he limp?”

            “I don’t know,” answered Ellen, truthfully. “But sometimes people don’t like to talk about the places they’ve been hurt.”

            This was something Ellen had told her daughter before. The first time Tallie had asked about the scar on her mother’s face, Ellen sat before the fireplace in this very same house and told her where it came from. Tallie had been too young to grasp the horror or the pain, even as Damian had watched them both anxiously, knowing that this was Ellen’s story to bear, but wishing as always that there was something he could do to make it less painful for her.

            “I’m telling you this because I love you,” Ellen had told her daughter, holding Tallie in her lap. “And because I want you to tell me whenever you get hurt, too. But it was hard for me to tell this to you, because I don’t like remembering the things that hurt me. When you see someone with a scar like mine, or something else that looks like they got hurt, you have to wait until you know them really well before you ask them.” It was a lesson every child had to learn, and Ellen thought that Tallie knew it well.

            “Is his leg fake?” asked Tallie, leaning out of the doorway to catch a glimpse of the boy as he disappeared down the hallway.

            “Don’t you think there are more important things to know about him than that?”

            “Yes,” answered Tallie, finally retreating back into the room, closing the door behind her. Looking back at her mother, she asked flatly, “Why is Daddy scared of him?”

            Ellen’s instinct was to reassure her child. “Daddy’s not scared him,” she wanted to say, but she didn’t. She had promised her daughter that she would never lie to her without a good reason, and she could not think of one for this. “Your father doesn’t know who he is yet,” Ellen said. “And you know that Daddy doesn’t like strangers.”

            This was an understatement; even as young as she was, Tallie knew that her father had not made many friends abroad, much preferring the quiet company of his family to reaching out and taking a chance on someone he didn’t know. It had taken a full year of knowing them and a complete background check through all of Oracle’s networks before he had even allowed her to sleep over at a friend’s house.

            “If he’s a stranger,” said Tallie, “why’s he staying with Baba?”

            Ellen went to the bed, where Tallie’s dress was lying on the comforter. “Put your dress on,” she said. Dutifully, Tallie went to the bedside, allowing her mother to help her into the dress. “Nabil doesn’t have any family here,” Ellen said, buttoning up the back of Tallie’s dress. “So we’re going to be his family now.”

            “Like me and Tom?” asked Tallie. Adoption was a language Tallie understood, and Ellen was grateful for this.

            “Yes,” she answered. “A little.”

            “Is he my brother now?”

            Ellen considered this. Unlike the rest of Damian’s family, she and her husband seemed to live their lives in shades of gray. It would be easy to tell her daughter that Nabil was here forever now, a son, a brother, a part of their ever-growing family. But she thought of the pain he caused Damian, pain from an origin Damian could hardly even articulate. Ellen wanted to do right by this boy, but she also was not about to prioritize him over the needs of her family.

            “No,” answered Ellen, smoothing back the hairs escaping from the bun on her daughter’s head. She had done Tallie’s hair, pulled it back, twisted into something pretty and elegant, something that fit in better to the grand opulence of the Manor in which they stayed, drenched in aristocracy as it was. This was the only part of her husband that Ellen resented, and in defiance of their careless elegance her daughter’s hair was characteristically imperfect. She suspected Damian would not notice. Where his daughter was concerned, Damian could see no imperfection.

            In what was not a lie (not technically, anyhow), Ellen said, “Nabil is not your father’s son. I hope that one day Daddy will love him like a son, because I think that Nabil needs somebody to do that for him, but he’s not your brother, not like Tom is.” Turning Tallie around so they faced each other, Ellen added, “But we are going to treat Nabil very kindly, because he’s gone through a lot, and also because everyone deserves to be treated kindly.”

            This was, Ellen thought, the only lie that she had told her daughter today. But it was a lesson that children should be taught, and one day Ellen intended to tell her the truth, if she did not find it out on her own.

            For one moment, Tallie looked up at her mother with her deep brown eyes, her lips pressed together as if she were holding words back, keeping them trapped in her mouth, between her teeth. But the moment passed, and the girl nodded. Turning back to the mirror, Ellen checked her braid one more time. Tallie said, “I still don’t know who he is.” In fairness, she clarified, “Other than not my brother, I guess.”

            “You think I know him better than you do?” asked Ellen pointedly, opening the door, gesturing for her daughter to join her. “I’ve only known him as long as you have. The only way to find out who he is, Natalia, is to get to know him.”

            Tallie made a face, sticking out her tongue. “Be nice,” warned Ellen, and they exited the room together, heading to where the rest of the family, and Nabil, already waited.

2.

            Nabil was in his room. Downstairs, the muffled sounds of a party gathering steam filled the house. Damian’s daughter was fourteen years old, and he had taken this opportunity to spoil her rotten (not like, Nabil thought, that was any different from the norm). Dick had invited him to come downstairs, and Bruce had sat with him for a few minutes, almost pleading, but Nabil preferred to stay safely tucked away in his room. It was not the room that he used to have, in his own world - but that room was beside Damian’s in this universe, and Nabil could not bring himself to come that close to the man who looked so much like his father.

            Miserably, he leafed through an old copy of _The Phantom Tollbooth_. Back in his own universe, it had been his father’s favorite book. Many nights as a child he had drifted to sleep by the sound of his father’s voice gently reading from its pages. Unlike so many things here, this had been the same in both worlds: Nabil had found the book in Manor’s library, in the same spot the copy was placed at home. In some ways this comforted Nabil, knowing that he was so close to home, but more so it hurt him. (If the book was the same, he thought bitterly, why weren’t the people?)

            A knock at the door startled him; he had heard no footsteps in the hallway, and he did not like to be snuck up on. Getting up, he laid the book aside and went to the door. Dick again, maybe, intent on making Nabil admit exactly why he didn’t want to come downstairs.

            As soon as he opened the door, he realized why he hadn’t heard footsteps. Mar’i Grayson hovered an inch or so off the ground (making her several inches taller than he was, which he suspected was an intimidation tactic). Before she said anything, she threw her arms around Nabil, engulfing him in a rib-crushing hug. “Sweetheart,” she sighed, squeezing the breath out of his lungs. “How are you? Are you well? Have you been taking care of yourself?”

            Nabil said, “Hi, Mar’i,” and then, “I’m doing all right. How are you?”

            Her lip trembled, and she confessed, “Not well. Lian was away on a business trip for two weeks, and I was very lonely.” She instantly brightened into a beaming smile, like the rays of sunshine she so loved. Her laughter was infectious, and Nabil couldn’t keep back a little grin as she continued, “But she got back last night, just in time for the party! I was so afraid I’d have to come unaccompanied. Then,” she added, nudging Nabil good-naturedly, “then you could have been my date - instead of hiding up here in your room.”

            That was enough to dampen Nabil’s spirits. “I’m not hiding,” he began, but she shook her head.

            “You can’t not attend a party at your own _house_ ,” she said, physically taking him by the arm and tugging him out of his room. In the time he had come to know Mar’i Grayson, he had learned not to say no to a Tamaranean, so he reluctantly let her pull him out of his room and lead him down the stairs. “The cake is very pretty,” she said. “Did you help make it?”

            “No,” answered Nabil. “But I baked some of the cookies.”

            “No _wonder_ they’re so good!” As they reached the bottom of the stairs (taking their time - Nabil was grateful that Mar’i did not seem eager to move any faster than his leg would allow), she squeezed his arm. “It’s a party,” she said, and there was kindness and love in her voice. “Have some cake. Be proud of your cookies. Try to relax for a while.” Nabil cast a dark look towards the living room, where they both could hear Damian, chatting animatedly with Lian. Before Nabil could speak, Mar’i added, “Don’t let him ruin everything for you.”

            “It’s _his_ party-”

            Mar’i said, “I don’t mean just today,” and paused a moment, her bright green eyes searching his own. Then she continued, “Besides, it’s not his party, it’s Tallie’s. She’s the birthday girl, and I require that you go wish her a happy birthday. Once you’ve done that, if you still want to you can go straight back up to your room.”

            Nabil wanted to remind Mar’i, _You’re not my mother_ , but he couldn’t bring himself to say it.

            Instead, he relented, asking tiredly, “Where is she?”

            Beaming at him, Mar’i replied, “In the garden with Al and Tommy. Sahar came too, but she also doesn’t want to be here, so you two can bond over that!” She giggled, kissed Nabil on the cheek, and pointed towards the French doors leading to the back garden. “Go,” she said, before shooting off to join Damian and her wife.

            Part of him wanted to forget Mar’i and head right back upstairs to his room. But he thought of her smile, of her kindness, of her and Lian’s willingness to open their home to him when he couldn’t bear to be in the home that he had lost. Surely he could do this one thing for her.

            So he headed out into the garden. As usual, Al was playing with Tommy, and Sahar, kicking a ball through the air, testing how fast they could fly to catch up with it. Tallie sat with Catherine, lecturing her on the importance of matching jewelry, displaying the new diamond necklace and earrings her father had given her. In between them, Tom sat, transfixed by one of Tallie’s earrings, sparkling in the springtime sun. As Nabil watched, Tom lifted his hand and reached up - for one single moment, Nabil thought that the boy was going to tear the jewel out of his sister’s ear - but Tallie, barely noticing her brother, reached up removed the earring herself, handing it to him as she continued her speech to Catherine. Tom turned it over and over in his hands, watching it sparkle with light.

            Nabil stepped outside, closing the doors behind him. He made his way over to the wrought-iron table where the three of them sat. Tallie pretended not to notice at first, but Tom glanced up at him blankly.

            Always unsure what to say to Damian’s son, Nabil nodded at the diamond in the boy’s hands and said, “That’s very pretty.”

            “I know,” said Tallie, with a brief and pointed roll of her eyes. “Anyway, Catherine, if you ask maybe my daddy’ll get you a pair next year, so you can match with me-”

            Instantly, Nabil’s motivation waned. Wanting to fulfill Mar’i’s request as quickly as possible then head back upstairs, he said, “Happy birthday, Tallie.”

            It was Tom who spoke then. “Happy homecoming,” he corrected simply, rolling the earring back and forth between his thumb and forefinger.

            Of course; for Nabil it felt natural for a birthday to be a birthday, but in the Nayar-Wayne’s world a birthday meant a homecoming. As a baby, Tallie was abandoned, and her exact date of birth was unknown, so her parents had always celebrated the day they brought her home to Gotham as an approximate birthday. This arrangement seemed strange and foreign to Nabil. Adoption seemed loaded and complex and scary to him, but Tallie took it very much in stride, more as a point of pride than a source of existential anxiety. (The first time they had met, he’d asked how old she was because he didn’t know what else to say to a kid. “I’m eleven,” she’d said, her dark eyes flashing, “probably.”)

            Tom’s comment had prompted a derisive glance from Tallie, but clearly she did not deign herself to respond to his mistake, not even to mock it. This was kinder than she usually was. Her pleasure at being the center of attention, perhaps, had softened her usually sharp edges. Humbly, never one to ignore his mistakes, Nabil said, “Happy homecoming, Tallie. Many happy returns.”

            There; he was done, and he could return to his room with a clean conscience.

            But at that moment, he heard the doors to the house open behind him, and a number of voices spilled out into the garden. Nabil did not turn around, dreading the inevitable interaction.

            He was taken utterly by surprise when Damian clapped a hand on his shoulder. “I was wondering when you’d show up,” he said, and Nabil was instantly suspicious. He glanced behind Damian, at Lian, who recognized Nabil’s discomfort and pointed at her own hand, at the drink there. Sure enough, Damian too had a drink, and the slight smell of alcohol on his breath gave him away. Naturally. The only way Damian could interact with Nabil without scowling his way through it was when he was at the very least mildly intoxicated. “Tallie, sweet girl,” said Damian, his hand still resting on Nabil’s shoulder, too firm to be entirely friendly, “what happened to your earring?”

            Her hand flickered to her empty earlobe, and she said, “Tom has it.”

            Damian looked down at his son. At the expression on Damian’s face, Nabil felt a brief and guilty spike of triumph in the pit of his stomach; the man looked at Tom as if he did not know him, as if he could not recognize him, as if he were not the child he had raised almost since birth.

            It was Ellen who saw this as well, and intervened. “Damian, let the kids play,” she said, taking her husband’s arm, tugging him away. “Tom, give your sister back her earring.”

            “I don’t have it,” said Tom, and the lie was less alarming than the sound of honesty in his voice, a perfect lie from such a small child. But Tallie said, “You’re lying, Tom, give it back,” and he did so, and Tam brushed her daughter’s hair back and said, “You have your inhaler with you, baby?” and Catherine nodded, and Ellen pulled her husband away from the kids.

            “Nabil,” said Damian.

            It took all the willpower he had to acknowledge this, and look around.

            Damian gestured for him to come with them. Knowing that he had to go back inside to go to his room anyway, he assented, following the adults as they spilled back into the Manor. “Nabil,” said Lian, falling back with him. “I heard you’re going back to school.”

            With a nod, grateful for the excuse not to talk to Damian, Nabil replied, “Yeah, this fall. Homeschooling is fine, but it’d be nice to get out of the house once in a while, I guess.”

            “Brentwood?”

            “Gotham Academy,” Nabil told her. “Bruce enrolled me, it’s where he went.”

            “Are you going to dorm?”

            “Nah, I’ll just stay here at the-”

            “Nabil,” called Damian, from across the room. He put his drink down, then waved at Nabil to come over.

            It was like, Nabil thought, a trainwreck in slow motion, and Nabil didn’t know why nobody stopped it. In retrospect, he remembered seeing Ellen reach out and grab hold of her husband’s arm, whispering something urgently into his ear; he could remember heat emanating from beside him, evidence of Mar’i’s temperature rising with her temper, and Lian began, “Damian-” but the older man ignored all of this, yanking his arm out of his wife’s grip and moving forward.

            “Nabil,” said Damian. “Did you get a present for Tallie?”

            Nabil shook his head. “No,” he said.

            With an understanding nod, Damian continued, “It’s all right, I didn’t expect you to, and we haven’t done presents yet, not really - the jewelry was just something I thought of, I thought it’d be nice to let her wake up to something new.”

            “Very thoughtful,” said Nabil.

            “Nabil,” said Damian again, and it made Nabil uncomfortable, that this man kept saying his name, as if he liked the feel of it coming from his mouth. He dug into his pocket, extracted something, and held it out to Nabil.

            The younger man looked at it, then back up at Damian.

            It was a keychain. Damian jangled it slightly, and the keys all clinked together. “It’s okay,” said Damian. “We can wait until you get back before we do presents.”

            It was an uncomfortable moment, made all the worse by the fact that Damian was slightly slurring his words, obviously not clear-headed. Despite this, there was no malice in the man’s eyes. Maybe he genuinely thought he was doing Nabil a favor.

            “That’s all right,” said Nabil.

            “Come on,” replied Damian. “It’s rude not to have a gift.”

            “No thanks.”

            “Just try. For me. For her.”

            “I can’t,” said Nabil.

            “What do you mean you-”

            “I can’t drive,” said Nabil icily. “Not without a pressure adjustment for my prosthetic.”

            There was a terrible pause.

            Damian pocketed his keys. Brushing past her husband, Ellen went to Nabil, taking his hand. “Let’s go for a walk,” she said.

            They headed into the house, towards the stairs - back to his room, at last - but Damian said, “Hold on.”

            Lian smacked Damian on the side of the head and began, “What’s wrong with you, you piece of-” but she was interrupted by another voice, much younger.

            “That’s okay,” said Tallie, at the door to the garden. She looked to her father, then at Nabil, then back at Damian. “I wouldn’t want a present from him anyway.”

            “ _Tallie_ -” began Ellen, ready to reprimand her daughter.

            Nabil had never known Tallie to be crueler than her father - which was not, entirely, saying all that much. Despite that, he also knew that she was fourteen years old and that she worshipped her father, and if one of the two of them were to blame, it was the father, not the daughter.

            Still, in that second he fucking hated that little girl.

            “Be nice, Tallie,” said Damian, his words more pronounced now, collecting himself for the sake of his daughter. “It’s not Nabil’s fault that he didn’t want to be here in the first place.”

            “I don’t know,” responded Nabil, “it’s probably better than being dead.”

            Ellen squeezed his wrist, but whether out of sympathy or in caution, he was not sure.

            “But,” he continued, and he barely registered how loud his voice had risen, “I'm sure you'd disagree with me on that one.”

            There was a moment of needle-dropping silence. Then Nabil pulled his wrist out of Ellen’s grip and headed up the stairs, bad leg lending an awkward limp to his ascent.

 2.

            Tallie sat across from Nabil in the limo as it drove through the Gotham streets.

            “Remind me why you’re coming again,” she said, staring at him relentlessly.

            “Because your mother asked me to,” answered Nabil.

            “Tom isn’t coming.”

            “So?”

            Tallie didn’t answer for a moment, glancing up and down the boy before her. “I don’t want people to get the wrong idea.”

            Nabil was not completely sure which idea she meant, but didn’t press it. They were attending a charity event for Wayne Enterprises. Damian, being CFO of the company, was hosting, and had arrived earlier. He had asked Tom to accompany his sister, but the boy had refused, citing schoolwork, even though it was obvious to everyone that whatever he was doing down in the Cave on the Batcomputer, it was not schoolwork. Lately, the Waynes had been trying to include Nabil more, stopped pretending he was a faux-brother and tried to get to know him for who he really was. Had Damian asked him to attend, Nabil likely would not have come; but he liked Ellen and she wanted to get to know him, he could tell, and so he told her he’d come, arrive with Tallie later in the evening after the business guests had all shown up and the party was loosening into something a little more entertaining.

            Nabil suspected that Tallie didn’t want to go that badly, but she was wearing an exquisite new dress sent from Lian, part of her latest ballgown line, and Tallie liked to be seen wearing exquisite things. As obnoxious as he found her, he would not deny the fact that she a vision tonight, red lips, smoky eyes, dark skin shimmering in the low lights of the car.

            Glancing out the car window, Nabil said, “You should’ve asked Jamal to come with you. I bet he’d be fun at an event like this.”

            “He wouldn’t go,” Tallie replied. “I offered to buy him a tuxedo and everything. He said he’d rather not feed at the capitalist trough with the rest of the iniquitous beasts. He also called my father the Antichrist. I thought it best to leave him at home.”

            With a chuckle, Nabil said, “That sounds like him.” There was a slight pause, and then Nabil added, “I don’t know why you like him.”

            There was a moment between them, and then Tallie relaxed slightly, slouching in her dress, shrugging. “Me neither,” she answered Nabil. “I think I only like him because he doesn’t like me.”

            Nabil looked up, about to protest this, but she made a face and continued.

            “I mean he likes _me_ ,” she said, to clarify. “But not who I am. Not what I am. Where I come from.”

            This seemed unlike Tallie to Nabil, but he didn’t feel equipped to argue it with her right now. Without looking back at her, Nabil murmured, “Well. He and I have that in common.”

            Derisively, Tallie let out a small laugh. “How come you always act like you’re so removed from our kind of life?” she asked him, sounding genuinely intrigued. “Last time I checked, your last name _is_ Wayne.”

            “I’m not your family,” he said.

            “You live with us,” she replied simply. “We’re as good as.” A pause, and then she added, “And in another world, who knows? You could have been.”

            This prompted him to look her in the face, finally. She was not quite smiling at him, but her expression was somewhere softer than a smirk. Quietly, he told her: “I doubt it.”

            Bruce had stayed home with Tom, and Lian hadn’t been able to come, so Nabil found himself somewhat at a loss for what to do once they exited the car and entered the party. Damian welcomed the two of them, Tallie more exuberantly (but then, Nabil could hardly blame him for that), and then he whisked his daughter around, introducing her to all his business associates. Ellen usually played the part of the supportive wife very well, but for Nabil’s benefit, he guessed, she hung back with him, lounging by the food. “There’s an open bar,” she said. “Help yourself.”

            When he glanced at her, there was a wry smile on her face. “Thanks,” he said. “For inviting me, I mean. It’s nice to get out of the house once in a while.”

            “Of course,” answered Ellen, with a nod. “But I heard you get out plenty. Bruce says he’s seen you with Tallie and her friend.”

            Yes, Nabil had gone out with Tallie and Jamal a few times, but mostly they smoked weed together and listened to Jamal wax philosophical about the importance of a black Robin to this city, completely unaware that he was sitting with Robin’s cousin. One such outing had ended up with Nabil crying on the floor of a 7-11, an embarrassing adventure during which they were lucky nobody recognized Natalia Nayar Wayne, granddaughter of Bruce Wayne (a celebrity even in his old age). So technically yes, he did spend time with Tallie, although he wasn’t sure that she was his friend. Maybe more like his drug dealer.

            How to answer Ellen’s question? “Yeah,” he admitted, “but we never do anything as fancy as this.”

            Ellen must have misinterpreted his lie for a lack of enthusiasm for the event, and she smiled at him. “Don’t worry,” she told him. “You don’t have to stay for long. Tallie will probably get bored an hour or so, and you two can go home.”

            “Right,” said Nabil, with a nod.

            He stayed by the food, picking at crab puffs and inspecting the selection of exotic cheese. After a while, someone sidled up to him, carving out a chunk of brie with a cracker. “Hi,” said Tallie, stuffing her mouth.

            “Hi,” responded Nabil. “Don’t tell me you’re bored already.”

            Ignoring his comment, she reached out and plucked his champagne glass from his hand. “Did you get this for me?” she asked. “How thoughtful.” She went to take a sip, but Nabil slipped the glass out of her grip.

            As she faux-pouted at him, he said, “This is not the kind of party seventeen-year-olds get to drink at, Tallie.”

            “Eighteen,” she corrected, with a grin; then she cocked her head and added fairly, “probably. Give it back.”

            She lunged out to swipe the glass from his hand, and he pulled it out of her reach; in her high heels, the movement made her lose her balance, and with a loud ripping sound she tripped very suddenly and very violently. One hand still holding the champagne, Nabil caught her halfway down, although by that point it seemed like she’d steadied herself already. For a moment, he held her with one arm. Then he asked, “Are you all right?”

            “Fuck,” she said, so loudly and emphatically that some older gentlemen a few feet away looked around in surprise.

            Instantly glancing around self-consciously, Nabil let go of her, took a step back. “Is that a yes?”

            “No,” she answered darkly, and she pointed to the hem of her dress, where there was a tear in the airy fabric. “Dammit. And this was a gift from Lian. I _told_ her I wanted a cocktail dress.” Gathering her dress up in her gloved hands to inspect the rip (which was not a ladylike move at all, and Nabil glanced around, acutely aware of sideways glances from old white men all around them). Sounding genuinely distressed, she continued, “I’m going to trip all over this, _damn_ it, now I’m mad-”

            Nabil reached out and took her hands, gently prying her fingers away from the dress. “Come on,” he murmured, and loosely holding onto her hands - gloved as they were, it still felt like an intimate gesture, one that made him feel indecently uncomfortable - he tugged her away from the table, to the side of the ballroom. She began to protest, but he just said, “I have an idea.”

            Slipping out a door and into a hall at the west end of the ballroom, Tallie tripped on her trailing hem again, and this time he caught her but stumbled on his prosthetic, and they both careened for a moment, almost falling - but then the heel broke off of her right shoe, and her own jolting fall counterbalanced Nabil’s, and somehow they ended up back upright.

            Once they were steady, she still held onto his arms, and his were still wrapped around her body. For one awkward second, they deliberately didn’t look at each other, then Tallie wrenched herself away. In the empty hallway, she smacked his chest and said sharply, “Romantic, asshole.”

            Then she turned and walked past him. He blinked, then turned around and followed her. Angrily he began to say, “I wasn’t _trying_ to be-” but she wasn’t listening.

            “What’s your idea?” she asked. She stopped walking, probably because she realized that Nabil knew where they were going and she didn’t. Blankly (looking so like her brother as she did so), she turned back to Nabil, folding her arms beneath her breasts, only accentuating her cleavage. For a very brief moment, Nabil wondered if she was doing that for his benefit, then stopped and reminded himself _no_ of _course_ not, why would he even think that?

            He said, “I can fix your dress.”

            She stared at him. She arched one elegant eyebrow (that look was all her father).

            “Not perfectly,” he added, hating that he could feel a flush rising to his face under her discerning gaze. “But enough to last you the rest of the night. If you don’t want to go home, that is.” He paused, allowing her time to say if she did. Instead, Tallie only cocked her head slightly, observing him carefully. So he took a breath and continued. “This place is a hotel,” he said. “I mean it is where I come from, at least. The upper floors are high end suites, I’ve stayed here before with my-” he was about to say _parents_ , but the word caught in his throat, sticking like a burr somewhere in the back of his mouth. Clearing his throat, he said, “I’ll run down to reception, see if they have any of those little bathroom kits with sewing supplies in them.”

            At first, it seemed like she was going to reject his proposal. And then she asked, “Are you for real?”

            Anxiously, he nodded. “I’m for real.”

            She considered him, glancing up and down his body, then said: “Okay, sure, Snow White.”

            “All right,” he said. “Wait here.”

            The front desk did in fact have a bathroom kit available, but were reluctant to provide it at first. It was only when they suspiciously asked him if he shouldn’t get back to work that he realized they thought he was a server at the party. Unwilling to call the front desk worker out on what Nabil was sure was a subtle act of racism (or maybe just wanting to get back to Tallie as quickly as possible), he seized on the assumption and said, “Right, yes, I’m - Mr. Wayne sent me, asked me to get it for him.”

            That immediately made the front desk worker much more generous, and they handed him a kit, a needle and thread included, and offered their highest regards to Mr. Wayne. Nabil took note of the person’s name, hoping he remembered to tell Bruce to get them fired later.

            He hurried back to the hallway where Tallie waited. She had taken off her shoes, and was sitting beside an ornate vase situated in a wall niche. As he approached he watched her fiddling with her broken heel, and realized that he could not help her there.

            “Hey,” he said, and she only barely glanced up at him. “I got a sewing kit, but I’m sorry, I didn’t even think to ask about superglue or anything-”

            “It’s fine,” she answered, holding up what looked like slips of tape. “I’ve got it covered.”

            Double-sided tape seemed like an oddly specific thing for Tallie to have, so he asked, “What’s that for?”

            Carefully applying it to the heel of her shoe, which had snapped off very neatly, she answered, “It’s boob tape. You didn’t think my tits are naturally this perky, did you?” and Nabil absolutely did not have a response to that. She pressed the heel to the back of the shoe and added, “I figure if if it’s strong enough to hike up the girls for a couple hours, it might be able to keep my shoe intact until we can get out of here.”

            “Smart,” he said. His throat was dry, and he didn’t like wondering why. She slipped the shoe on her foot, gingerly testing it on the ground. An elderly couple strolled past them, peering at them voyeuristically as they did so. “Let’s see if we can’t find a little privacy,” said Nabil, helping her to her feet.

            “ _Tt_.” This made her sound just like her father. “For what?”

            “You’re the one who said you didn’t want people getting the wrong idea, remember?”

            Tallie didn’t like it when people turned her own words against her, and a flicker of that dislike crossed her face. But then she shrugged, seeing his point, and he tried a wide doorway on the side of the hall - a parlor room of sorts, a meeting room for very specific old men making business deals. Allowing Tallie to lean on him to keep weight off her heel, still unsure how well the adhesive would hold, the two of them limped into the room. She collapsed into a cushy armchair, and he closed the door behind them. As soon as he did, all ambient sound from the party instantly vanished, from the voices of the chattering rich to the syrupy violin solo from the band.

            There was silence. The lights were off, and it was dark in the room.

            Then Nabil switched on the lights. He turned around and opened the bathroom kit, taking out the sewing supplies. He knelt before Tallie sitting in the armchair. “Where’s the tear, again?”

            She adjusted her dress and he saw it; it was the silky fabric beneath the airy skirt that was torn, trailing just enough to slip her up if she didn’t pay attention. It was an easy temporary fix, especially considering that it would be hidden underneath another layer of fabric. While she watched, he took out the white thread, wetting the tip in his mouth before poking it through the eye of the needle.

            “How do you know how to do that?” she asked.

            He glanced up at her. “What, sew?”

            “Yeah.” He tied a knot in the end of the thread. “It’s so…” she paused, searching for words, “...provincial. Don’t tell me they had you darning your own socks back in your world.”

            Again, he wanted to say, “ _My parents_ ,” and tell her about what they were like where he came from, but he could not. “You never had to learn any of this because Damian spoils you,” he told her. _Damian_ seemed much safer to say than _your father_ , because if he said that he might also think _my father_ and he did not want to think that. “I was raised to anticipate every single emergency that could come up in the field,” he told her, “up to and including emergency uniform repairs. I bet Al could sew this up too. It’s just a shame she’s not here.”

            Al rarely made an appearance at these events. Ever since her mother had broken from Wayne Enterprises to found Fox Consolidated, the Foxes were seen less and less at WE events; and Al had never liked the opulence of these parties, anyway.

            Cautiously, he took the hem of her dress. The light was not good in the room, so he squinted down at the tear, lifting it to eye level to inspect it.

            She laughed, and he glanced up, and then noticed that in lifting her hem he had also lifted the rest of her dress, and could veritably stare up her skirt.

            Immediately, he let go of the dress, let it gently fall back down. “I’m sorry,” he said quickly, but she shook her head.

            “It’s fine,” she told him, amused. “I’m wearing underwear. And you’re not really the type of guy who gets off on upskirt shots anyway, so whatever.”

            He asked, “Are you sure?” and she said, “Just fix the damn dress, okay?”

            Doing his best to focus on the hem of the dress and ignore his proximity to her legs, Nabil went to work, carefully threading the needle through the fabric.

            For a minute or so, there was silence. And then Tallie said: “Nabil.”

            “Yeah.”

            “You lost your leg in the field, didn’t you?”

            He stiffened slightly, and hoped Tallie didn’t notice, but he knew that she did. “Yeah,” he said again. “I did.”

            “So,” she began thoughtfully, watching him, “they prepared you to prevent a torn-up costume, but not to prevent traumatic loss of limb?”

            Nabil didn’t answer.

            He was sure that Tallie knew there was a line, and while she may have come close before, her father had never quite crossed it (not in front of her, anyway), and so neither had she. Most of the time, though, Damian chose to ignore Nabil’s prosthetic leg, no doubt seeing it as a failure, a weakness, proof that, even across universes, Nabil still had the ability to profoundly let him down. It had been years since Nabil lost his leg, and he did not hate the prosthetic anymore, nor did he completely hate the stump of a limb that was left without it - although he did hate the phantom tingling, remnants of toes stretching into the darkness when in reality there was nothing there, and he hated the throbbing ache in the mornings, a pain which generally preceded rain. It was not the summer rainstorms that caused these aches: more often it was the light showers of spring, beginning just after his birthday.

            Tallie was a springtime baby. She was rain, but at that moment the ache was in his chest, not his stump.

            “It was a mistake,” he said simply.

            “Oh, that’s good,” she replied. “And here I was thinking you’d _deliberately_ amputated your own leg.”

            “I don’t want to talk about it.”

            “I do,” she said. “I let you peek up my skirt, now you have to let me peek under the hood too. It’s only fair.”

            “I didn’t look up your skirt, Tallie.”

            “Well, then, you’re missing out. Did Croc bite it off?”

            “ _Tallie_.”

            “ _Nabil._ Tell me.”

            “No,” he said stonily. “If you ask me again, you can sew up your own dress.”

            Neither of them said anything. He continued, painstakingly binding the fabric together once more.

            Then she lifted the foot that wore the jury-rigged heel, and prodded Nabil’s cheek with her toe.

            “Tallie,” he said, batting her foot away. “Don’t.”

            This time she placed the red sole of the heel against Nabil’s face, and again he reached up to bat her away. “Cut it _out_ ,” he said. Brandishing the needle, he warned, “I’ll poke you with this, I swear.”

            “Lick it,” said Tallie.

            He stopped, and looked up at her.

            Although she was not grinning, there was that typical air of triumph about her, of superiority, that satisfaction of knowing that she was in control. She twisted her ankle, waving her shoe about before his face, and repeated, “Lick it. I dare you.”

            This was punishment, for refusing to tell her what she wanted to know. Tallie had a mean streak in her, but he knew that she wasn’t doing it to see him debase himself: she expected him to say no as he had said no only a moment before. It was a half-dare, not a question because she already knew the answer. It was a demand with no safe answer, and Nabil hated that Tallie could employ such power over him.

            Well. She had chosen to perform her little power trip at a bad time; Nabil had no desire to give her this influence over him tonight.

            Staring up at her, keeping steady, intense eye contact, Nabil opened his mouth and placed his tongue on the tip of her glossy black shoe. This had the intended effect; instead of smiling, Tallie’s eyes grew wide, and her jaw might have dropped just a tiny bit. He closed his lips on his tongue, turning the gesture into a kiss. Then he pulled his mouth away, never tearing his gaze away from her dark eyes.

            He went back to his sewing. She sat there before him, fingers clutching the sides of the armchair, dress hiked up to expose her long legs, pulsing with electricity wherever he brushed against her skin.

3.

           “Happy birthday to you, happy birthday to you, happy birthday dear Tom-and-Nabil, happy birthday to you!”

           Stephanie snapped a picture gleefully as the boys leaned forward to blow out candles. Beside them, standing with his wife, Damian watched them with tentative hope in his eyes. It was the first birthday that the boys celebrated as brothers – just last year, before Nabil had entered his first year of law school, the family had legalized Nabil’s fabricated birth certificate, certifying Nabil as Damian’s son. It was more of an adoption in good faith than an acknowledgement of actual biological relation, but then that had in fact been one of the requirements that Nabil put on the table in the first place – the Damian Wayne and Stephanie Brown listed on his birth certificate were not of this universe, he’d said. “Don’t worry,” he’d said stoically. “It’s just a document. I know you two have no obligation to parent me.”

           This had made Damian uncomfortable, while they sat across from one other in the parlor room like some kind of business deal.

           Steph leaned in, took the boy’s hand. “Oh, Nabil,” she sighed. Her voice wavered with compassion. Damian had never heard weakness in her voice in the field, when confronted with horrors and atrocities and the possibility of certain death – but sitting here before a boy cut neatly out of the fabric of his world, she seemed fit to cry. “Yes,” she said sincerely. “We do.”

           It wasn’t that Damian disliked the boy anymore; as the years had passed, he’d grown accustomed to Nabil’s presence, his quiet ubiquity, no longer intrusive but almost reassuring. When he told Damian he’d like to go to law school, Damian offered to call his connections at Stanford and see what he could do. Although grateful, Nabil had refused. He was accepted into a local school, commuter’s distance away from Gotham. It wasn’t a hugely prestigious college, but Damian had found himself pleasantly relieved that Nabil would still be at home. Six or seven years ago, he never could have foreseen it, but the birth certification process was only formalizing something that was already undeniable – Nabil was a part of the family.

           Every year prior to this, despite indications from both Nabil and Tom that they didn’t care either way, the boys had ended up with separate cakes and mostly separate birthday celebrations, the same date of birth just another eerie whisper across the multiverse telling Damian that Nabil was the son he should have had.

           But he had gone over this with his wife Ellen, in the dead of night when no one but she could hear his doubts – Tom was not born to Damian, but to a poor girl who couldn’t support a baby. They had had an open adoption for the first year or so, but one Sunday night after a visit, the girl had talked to Ellen alone and admitted she couldn’t do this anymore. Damian had written a check for her, and she’d been out of town by Thursday. Last Damian heard, she was waitressing somewhere along the Texas coast, and in her letter she asked Ellen not to tell their son about her. This had not proved difficult. Tom had little interest in his birthmother.

           “How could the multiverse _know?_ ” Damian had asked, voice quiet before bed. “Tom was born in completely different circumstances than Nabil. Why would they share a birthday?”

           “Maybe it’s a coincidence,” murmured Ellen, shifting onto her side, watching her husband’s profile, the crease in his brow. “They’re six years apart, so it’s not as if they’re twins.”

           He glanced at her, but the look in his eye told her what he was about to say.

           “Coincidences happen, whether or not you believe in them,” she answered, with a slight roll of her eyes. “But just say it’s not. Maybe Tom was always destined to be our son. To be _your_ son.”

           Damian stared up at the ceiling in the darkness, tight-lipped. Coincidence, or destiny. It seemed he had to pick one of the two, and he did not believe in either.

           So the celebration was about more than just birthdays, and Damian had used it as an excuse to throw a party. Well, really Damian had mentioned to Lian that he would like to make it a special event this year, and she had taken it upon herself or organize a huge bash in Wayne Manor. It was the fifteenth of February, the day after Valentine’s Day, and also four days before Bruce’s birthday. The Manor was bedecked in red and pink and purple. Bruce had declined a cake, citing both a lack of sweet tooth and also that he’d prefer all these people not know how old the Batman had become (not that he was Batman anymore – he had retired years and years ago now, and Damian had been serving for more than a decade as his replacement).

            It was a happy day, and the Manor was full. After cake there was presents - Nabil got a watch and a patent leather briefcase, which were nice gifts and he was grateful, but paled in comparison to Tom’s gifts. Nabil did not mind much. Surely he could allow Damian this one small pettiness.

            When things began to wind down, Damian and Ellen ended up lounging in the living room with their daughter. Nabil and Tom were both on the piano, but Tom seemed to have little interest in playing with Nabil; he played whatever he wanted to, it seemed, with little regard for Nabil’s part. This was very much like Tom. Where he could, Nabil accompanied, but otherwise played very little.

            Lian came in from the kitchen, halfway through her second bottle of wine but, impressively, not yet showing it. Sitting beside Tallie, she complained to the room at large, “I am pretty sure my wife is now racing our child into the stratosphere. I told her, if he dies then it’s your fault, but she didn’t seem worried.”

            “Tommy can take it,” offered Nabil absently, from the piano. “He can handle a hard vacuum if it's not too long. Stratospheric conditions should be a cake for him.”

            Lian took a swig of her wine. “It worries me,” she said, “that you know that. What kind of training do you put them through over at the Tower?”

            “Nothing dangerous,” Nabil answered, and he gave up on the piano, turning around on the bench to face Lian. With a grin, he clarified, “Nothing _too_ dangerous, anyway.”

            “I don’t believe that,” said Lian. “But I’d like to.” Another sip of wine, then she reached out and took Nabil’s hand in a very motherly gesture, and asked, “Why does it feel like it’s been so long since I’ve seen you? Where’ve you been?”

            “Nabil was in Italy,” answered Damian, for him. “An early birthday present.”

            “Exciting,” said Lian. “All alone?”

            With a shrug, Nabil opened his mouth, but Tallie spoke over him. “Not completely,” she said coolly, watching Nabil. “We met up for a couple nights.”

            Frozen in place, Nabil hoped that Lian didn’t notice the way his grip on her hand tightened ever so slightly. The woman looked over to Tallie and said, “Weren’t you in France?”

            Nodding, Tallie said, “I was, but one of my friends is such an Artemisia Gentileschi fan, and she was _so_ upset that _Judith Slaying Holofernes_ wasn’t in the Louvre that we just had to make a detour to Naples to see it. Nabil was in the area, so we met up.”

            Tallie smiled at Lian, then at her parents.

            Nabil recognized the tune that Tom played at the piano, Ravel’s _Gaspard de la nuit_. It was a challenging piece, but Tom’s fingers flitted across the keys with ease, the melody smooth and uninterrupted. _Gaspard de la nuit_ : treasurer of the night. The poem on which it based was about a beautiful water fairy seducing a man into a lake, promising him a kingdom at the bottom. Fearlessly, Tallie recounted a story of exploring the ruins of Pompeii with Nabil, conveniently leaving out the quick, thrusting frottage whilst left unattended in the remains of an ancient brothel. A kingdom at the bottom of a lake seemed downright appealing to Nabil at the moment, and he let go of Lian’s hand and turned to look out the window, controlling the flush aching to rise to his cheeks, but unsure that he could look Damian in the eye.

            _Gaspard de la nuit_ , the poem, was written originally in French. Tallie’s favorite language. Tallie had spoken in French in the nights they spent together. He could still hear the lilt of her voice, feel her warm breath on his ear. When he had protested that she was speaking the wrong language, they were in Italy, after all, she had switched to English. “But French is the language of love,” she’d said, “which is exactly what we’re making right now.”

            Tom’s playing became much more dramatic, louder now. Tallie raised her voice, never one to be silenced. When Nabil finally worked up the nerve to look back at the rest of them, Damian seemed pleasant enough. But there was a knowing look in Ellen’s eye that frightened him. And rightfully so, he supposed. What right did he have to do this with her daughter? To keep it a secret from Ellen and her husband? (Well, for one, he began to reason, Damian would _kill him_ if he ever found out, so there was that.)

            But even as Tallie continued to regale the adults with stories of their completely platonic adventures in Italy, Nabil ached at the sound of her voice, ached for her touch, to bury his face in her hair once more. He wanted to tell her, over and over again, the only thing that had ever felt real and true in the entire ten years he’d been in this artificial, papier-mâché version of his home.

            The words hung in the back of his mouth, like so many other things he had not allowed himself to say. _I love you_ , he thought, watching her hungrily, hoping that she could hear him, sense the intensity of his gaze. _I love you_.

            Tom played on. The poem upon which it was based came to mind. Tallie would think of it in French, but Nabil knew it better in English.

 

_She beseeched me to accept her ring on my finger,_  
to be the husband of an Ondine, and to visit  
her in her palace and be king of the lakes. As I was  
_replying to her that I loved a mortal, sullen and spiteful_  
_she wept some tears, uttered a burst of laughter,  
_ _and vanished._

 

5.

            It was early June, and a rainstorm had just made its way through Gotham City, cleansing the air, purging the smoggy stink of the city blocks. On the grounds of Wayne Manor, sweet berries burst into life on low bushes, oranges and plums hung from trees. The garden was rich with life on the celebration of Tallie’s homecoming, but despite its inhabitants the house seemed quiet, still, and empty.

            Damian’s son Tom - Richard, really, he was named for his uncle but they always called him by his middle name, Thomas - had been gone for several months now. At first Damian and Ellen had worked tirelessly to find a way to bring him back from beyond, to save him. Batman had torn the League apart with his vindictive rage towards the Flash, Iris West, blank and unresponsive to his fury. “ _It had to happen_ ,” she had told him, flickering in and out of existence, too fast for him to touch her. “ _It was him or the world._ ”

            (His reply to her had been a lie, and the untruth of it had been what hurt him most of all. “ _I would have rather we all died_ ,” he’d shouted at the girl he once loved, mad with rage and loss, “ _than lose him_.”)

            Guilt bore down on them all, especially Lian. It was her body, after all, that had been used to open the rift in the Multiverse into which Tom had disappeared. Despite this, she was not the one who had lost a son, and she convinced the Waynes to hold this party for their daughter, their only remaining child, remembering what they still had.

            But it was a quiet, unhappy party. Al was with the Titans; Damian’s grief had led him to resign from the League, and word was that the Justice League was looking for a Bat to replace him. Cass had been their first choice of course, but she had turned down the offer, preferring to work with Lian’s Outsiders instead. This was not something Al had yet shared with Damian, afraid of how badly it might hurt him, so soon after the loss of his son.

            Ellen opened all the doors to the back garden, ushering the organic warmth of post-thunderstorm sun into the living room where they sat. It seemed more like a wake than a party, although Tom left no body in this world, no trace that he had been here except for an empty room and the weight of the Demon’s Head on their father’s neck. Tallie was practically an adult now, although since she got back from the mission that took her brother she had been playing the part of the good daughter, for her father’s sake. She had to the best of her ability, that is. The first few weeks had seen her bleak and inconsolable. Using what little Nabil had experienced of the Multiverse, they had done everything they could think of to get her brother back, but nothing had worked.

            (In a desperate moment, their bodies pressed together in the dead of night, he had taken her hands and gently put them to his throat. “I would give everything,” he whispered, while her eyes shone in the darkness, “if it would bring him back. If it would make you better.” Silently, her touch had turned gentle, and she kissed him, unable to admit that she had been forced to choose between brother and lover, and she had made her decision.)

            Despite Ellen, Lian, and Mar’i’s attempts to convince him otherwise, the brunt of Damian’s anger had fallen on Nabil. In the final moments of the crisis, Iris had warned them that the Multiverse had ways to correct itself, and even as the universe stabilized and the crisis began to end, Damian had rushed back home, horrified that the Multiverse might snatch Nabil away from his family once again-

            Damian had made it back to the Manor to find that Nabil was safe, and the Multiverse had instead taken the wrong son. Since then Damian had barely been able to look at him. Knowing when he wasn’t wanted, Nabil left the Manor. Still acting as support for the Titans, he moved into the Penthouse, using the Bunker beneath as his primary base. When he first tried to enter the Bunker with all its biometric security measures, it had not let him in. Slowly, it dawned on him that Damian had removed him from system.

            Tallie had come to his rescue when he called. She let him into the Bunker and used her overrides to restore his security clearance. Damian either did not know that she still saw Nabil, or else he was pretending that he didn’t, hoping that if he ignored it long enough whatever the two of them had between them would fade into unreality.

            An hour into the dull, unhappy party, it was beginning to occur to Lian that this might not have been a great idea.

            The doorbell rang. Looking up with a sad, helpless optimism, Damian asked, “Is that Al?” but Tallie was the one who got to her feet, scampering to the front hall, leaving the rest of the family behind.

            When she answered the door, a gentle murmur of lowered voices floated through into the living room. For a moment, Damian did not move; and then he glanced around, recognizing the voice in low conversation with his daughter.

            Even as Ellen took hold of his arm, saying, “Damian, don’t-” Damian shook her off, getting to his feet and heading straight out to the front hall, where Tallie was holding tightly onto Nabil’s hands.

            Before they noticed him, Damian watched as the man whispered, “Happy homecoming,” to Tallie, and she turned her face up and kissed him on the lips.

            “You too,” she told him, gently.

            “Natalia,” said Damian.

            Immediately, Tallie turned, positioning herself before Nabil as if to protect him. Nabil did not quite look up, unwilling or unable to meet Damian’s unforgiving gaze.

            Addressing Nabil, Damian asked quietly, “Didn’t I tell you not to come back?”

            “I invited him,” Tallie said stoically, staring her father down. “It’s my day and I wanted him here.”

            “It’s my house,” said Damian.

            “And I’m your daughter,” Tallie replied. “You don’t always get what you want, Daddy.”

            Anger sparked in Damian’s eyes and he asked her, “Do you think I don’t know that? You think after losing your brother, I don’t understand-”

            “I’m _sick_ of talking about Tom,” said Tallie, raising her voice. “I’m sick of you pretending like you miss him so much - I know you _wanted_ to love him, Daddy, we all did, but he never wanted that from us.”

            “How dare you,” said Damian.

            She hesitated, slipping her hands behind her, protectively touching Nabil’s sides. “Nabil did,” she continued. “And we both wronged him. I think we owe it to him to try and make that up.”

            They could practically see the fury pulsing in Damian’s face. “And you think you can fix this,” he began, dripping in venom, “by sleeping with him?”

            “ _Damian_ ,” said Ellen sharply, standing behind her husband.

            Tallie held up her hand to silence her mother, but kept her gaze mercilessly focused on her father, forcing him to look at her. When he could no longer bear it, he tore his eyes away, ashamed. “We failed Tom, Father,” said Tallie. “Why would you shut another son out of your life?”

            This was too much, and Damian could not contain himself. “He’s not my _son_ ,” he spat. “How much more of me would you ask I give to this intruder, Tallie? When he showed up he turned my life against me, he _villainized_ me - he turned my friends against me, my family,” Ellen reached out again, more forceful now, to stop Damian; he shook her off and hissed, “my own _wife_ \- he’s been siphoning you away from _years_ , sweet girl, and now he’s got what he wanted, hasn’t he? Now that Tom’s gone he can finally take what he’s always coveted, he can finally pretend to be my _son_ -” spitting with fury, Damian lunged for Nabil, but Tallie did not move, firmly planting herself in between her father and her lover. “You took,” heaved Damian, hatred rising in his eyes, “ _everything_ from me-”

            “From you?” asked Nabil, and there was incredulity in his voice. Tallie did not glance up at him, but she had not expected him to speak. Had she not made it clear to him that this was between her and her father?

            “ _I_ ,” continued Nabil, in disbelief, “took everything from _you?_ ”

            Damian did not answer this, but whether he did not deign to acknowledge Nabil’s words or he knew that he was wrong, none of them could say.

            Before he spoke, Nabil reached out and took Tallie’s hand, a small gesture of solidarity, of togetherness, that he knew Damian would hate. Voice hard, bearing down on the man before him, the would-be father, Nabil spoke. “I came here,” he began, “as a fifteen year old child. Displaced, dispossessed, the only evidence of the world into which I was born, where I had a family, where I had a life, where I had people who loved me. I came here, and I knew I didn’t belong, and I never asked you for anything. I never took anything from you, not even kindness, not even the things which were due to me not as your son but as a lost child.” They were mirror images of each other, Nabil and Damian, both shaking with fury and each their own righteous indignation. “Your friends?” Nabil echoed. “Your family? _You_ pushed them away. I wasn’t your son, Damian. I was never your son. I was a kid you mistreated.”

            “I let you live in my home,” Damian spat back. “I called you my _family_ -”

            “And you let yourself love me more than you loved your real son,” said Nabil, and it was these words more than any other that struck Damian, hit him like a blow to the face, “and now that he’s gone, you can’t admit to that. So you’re taking it out on me,” he said, “and on Tallie.”

            “Leave my daughter out of this.”

            “No,” said Tallie. She clutched tightly onto Nabil’s hands, her back pressed up against his body. “This is about us, Nabil and me.” She paused, letting this sink in, forcing her father to think about this thing that he had never wanted to acknowledge. Quieter, she added, “I think it’s always been about us, Daddy.”

            Damian’s mouth was pressed into a tight line; he shook his head, not wanting to see this, to hear this, wanting to pretend it wasn’t happening and that his family wasn't unravelling before him. “No,” he said simply, stubbornly, like a child throwing a tantrum. “This is,” he said, “unacceptable.”

            Tallie had nothing to say to this. Holding Nabil’s hand, she turned away from her father and headed towards the front door, still hanging ajar. “Let’s go, Nabil,” she said.

            “Hold on,” said Damian. She paid no attention to him. “Tallie, _wait_.”

            Tallie crossed the threshold of the door, and Damian reached forward and caught Nabil by the shoulder. Nabil tried to pull away from the older man’s touch, but Damian tugged backwards, and Nabil was yanked violently away from Tallie, the force of Damian’s grip toppling him to the ground. Immediately, Damian opened his mouth to snarl at Nabil, to tell him to stay away from Tallie and get the _hell_ out of his house, then someone wrenched Damian away from him.

            “Damian,” said Ellen, and her voice was no longer soft. “Don’t touch him.”

            Mar’i was already at Nabil’s side, near tears as she frantically asked if she was all right, gathering him close in a tight embrace. Like Tallie had done, Lian moved forward to place herself physically in between Damian and Nabil, even as Ellen held him back, unable to move forward even if he wanted to.

            In no hurry, Tallie went to Nabil. She helped him to his feet. For one second, they stood together in the front hall of Wayne Manor, as if matriarch and patriarch, husband and wife, as if they were the heirs they were both truly meant to be.

            Then Tallie said, “Goodbye,” and she led Nabil out of the home, and into the warmth of the springtime sun.

6.

            When Nabil arrived at the Manor, he left his car out front and got out, bringing a bag of clothes with him, and knocked on the door.

            It took Tallie almost a minute to answer. Inside the house was dark, and Tallie wore jeans and a sweatshirt. There were gray bags beneath her eyes.

            “Hi,” said Nabil. “Is that what you’re wearing?”

            She moved aside to let him in, then closed the door behind him. “No,” she answered.

            “Is your mom here?”

            “No,” she told him. Ellen had not been at Wayne Manor for some weeks now, despite the house having officially passed to her upon the death of her husband. It was too much for her, a sharp reminder of the boys she lost, of her family half gone. “She went straight to the venue. It’s probably good for her to be with Jay and Tam right now.”

            Nabil asked, “What about you?” but Tallie didn’t answer that. “Where is the venue, anyway?” he asked, as she headed upstairs to one of their respective rooms - they had never lived in this house together, not openly, anyhow, and did not have a room that belonged to them both. “I know they’re using the JLA transporters to keep the location a secret, but I’m curious. Do you know?”

            Tallie shrugged. “Somewhere in Kansas,” she said. “Probably because it’s so close to Superman. In case something goes wrong.”

            In another time, Nabil might have made a joke about how much damage could be done at a _wedding,_ really? But enough things had gone wrong in the past few years that he thought this a sound decision, so he said nothing. Before him, Tallie reached the top of the stairs and headed down a hallway. They were a floor beneath his room, so he reasoned they must be going to hers.

            Then he realized her room was in the west wing, and they were in the east. “Tallie,” he said. “Where are we-?”

            In answer to his question, she opened a door to a room. Light spilling in from vast curtained windows illuminated the master bedroom of Wayne Manor, mostly bare.

            This had been, up until Damian’s death mere weeks ago, Tallie’s parents’ bedroom. Unsure that this proximity was good for her, Nabil began, “Tallie…” but she went to the windows, pulled the silk drapes apart to shine natural light in.

            “My mother moved her things out before she left,” she told him. The lightness of her words betrayed her unwillingness to talk about what she had lost in certain terms, so he did not push her. Turning back to face him, she said: “It’s ours now.”

            Nabil watched her worriedly. He placed his bag of clothes down on the bed, and then he moved forward and slipped his arms around her. For a moment she did not move, stiff in his arms. Then she relented, and wordlessly she sank into his touch.

            Still, she did not speak.

            Until she pulled away from him, tucking her hair behind her ears. With a smile (a smile so unlike Tallie, a gentle, happy smile), she said, “Get dressed. I need to do my hair.”

            “Do you need help?”

            “No,” she answered, shaking her head. “Thank you, though.”

            Again, unlike Tallie. He wished he knew how to help her, but sometimes Tallie did not want to he helped. While he took out his clothes, she went into the bathroom, carefully fixing up her hair.

            “Nabil,” she said, when he was mostly dressed. “Will you pass me my dress?”

            There was a hanger with a long dress covered in a by a garment bag lain out on the bag. He picked it up and brought it to her, noticing the edges of the dress visible at the bottom of the bag. “A saree?” he asked.

            She nodded, taking it from him. “Thought I’d go a little traditional.”

            “You need help wrapping it?”

            Unsurprisingly, she shook her head. “Just don’t peek,” she told him, closing the bathroom door behind her.

            Nabil was not exactly put out that Tallie had refused his help, but he was a little disappointed that she had closed the door on him. Not yet in danger of being late to Tam and Jay’s wedding, he would’ve liked the opportunity for a few intimate moments while she undressed. Regardless, knowing that she needed her space at the moment, when he finished getting ready he sat down on the bed to wait for her.

            On first glance the room had seemed so bare, but upon closer inspection there were signs that it had been lived in for a long time. There was an indent on the right side of the bed which he suspected would never quite be gone, evidence of someone sleeping in the same position for many nights. Tucked beneath the nightstand was a collection of books, many of which Nabil recognized as Ellen’s favorites. He peered down at the tomes, noticing one he was surprised to see.

            Leaning down, he picked the old copy up, leafed through it. It was the very same book that used to be held in the library, a book he thought he’d lost years ago. No wonder he hadn’t been able to find it; Ellen had taken the Manor’s only copy of _The Phantom Tollbooth_ to read for herself.

            He felt a sudden rush of affection for Tallie’s mother. He wished she was there, if only to mourn with her daughter in the way that Nabil could not.

            The door to the bathroom opened; he looked up and Tallie stepped out, bedecked in crimson and gold, slipping earrings on. She held up a gold tikka inlaid with rubies. “Can you help me put this on?”

            He took it from her, and she turned around. With the bobby pin she provided him with, he placed the piece of jewelry in her hair.

            Once he was done, he trailed his hands down her arms, breathless at her beauty, something aching deep in his chest. Crimson and gold: bridal colors.

            Quietly, he said, “It’s not your wedding, Tallie.”

            They stood there in the master bedroom, surrounded by the trappings of husband and wife, and she did not turn around to look at him. “Tam’s wearing white,” she said. “I’m sure she won’t mind.”

            “I don’t want this to be who we are,” he said, before he could stop himself. “I don’t want the first thing we do after his death to be a wedding, like we were just waiting for him to go. I think that’s wrong. I think it’s disrespectful.”

            Tallie turned around to look at him, raising an eyebrow. Taking him by the collar of his suit jacket, she pointed out, “You never cared about being disrespectful when he was alive.”

            Strictly speaking, this was not true, but Nabil didn’t argue. “I just think it’s morbid,” he said. “What Tam and Jason are doing is not only for them, but for him too. They’re celebrating his life. We’d be celebrating his death.”

            “Good things,” said Tallie, and the sheen in her eyes told him that she needed to believe this, “can come from dying.”

            Still. This was not something he could bear hearing from her. “No,” he said, taking her hands. “Never.”

            For only a moment she met his gaze, then pulled away. Experimentally trailing her hands across her hair, she noticed the book that Nabil had discarded on the bed. “Were you reading that?” she asked, gesturing to the worn old copy of _The Phantom Tollbooth_. With a wry little smile, she told him, “That was Daddy’s favorite book.”

            The JLA transporter took them right from the Cave. Daylight was fading into evening in rural Kansas, fireflies beginning to come out, illuminating the path to the big blue farmhouse with their blinking lights. A flash of memory returned to Tallie, of the garden at the Manor decorated for a wedding, of a mother who wore red just as she did now. She had been three or four when she attended her parents’ wedding, sitting patiently with Baba, staring curiously at the other little girl she knew to be her cousin, dressed in pink and carrying a basket of flowers.

            Like her father had at his wedding, Nabil wore a tuxedo. Tallie thought of walking into the house, thought of her mother seeing the two of them, knowing what they meant, thought of sitting there in agonizing silence watching two people wed, a luxury she was sure they did not appreciate the way she might.

            “Nabil,” she said, catching his hand, stopping him in the lawn of the house. Uncertain, he glanced at the porch, then back at her.

            “What is it?” he asked.

            “Let’s leave,” she said.

            Wary of the genuine, unbending look in her eye, he did not answer right away. “Tallie-”

            “Please,” she said. This surprised Nabil enough to make him take pause. He could not recall ever hearing Tallie ask him for something with _please_ ; it sounded, he thought, much too like a plea for her taste. “I know you don’t want to go. They’ll just talk about my father the whole time, and the whole time you’ll have to pretend to miss someone you didn’t care about.”

            This stung, because it was not true. Tiredly he tried to correct her, “Tallie, it’s not that I-”

            But she shook her head resolutely, clinging to his hands. She tugged away from the house, back towards a country road across from which there was a dense forest of trees. With one wistful glance towards the farmhouse, he looked back at Tallie, and nodded.

            As he began to speak aloud the transporter codes, Tallie clapped a hand over his mouth, pulling him down to the road. “I don’t want to go home,” she said, leading him away from the house. Impending night leached the sunlight from the horizon, settling into gentle dusk. They walked down a badly paved road silently. After a few moments, Tallie stopped and removed her heeled shoes, holding them in hand. The road was rocky, and Nabil offered to carry her, but she laughed and turned him down, choosing instead to walk along the grassy edge beside the road.

            They came upon a flat and glassy lake, reflecting the brilliant golden-pinks of the setting sun. Tallie led him down to the bank, and then gathered up her skirt to sit down.

            “You’ll ruin your dress,” Nabil pointed out.

            She sat on the grassy bank, then looked up at him. “I don’t care about my dress.”

            He kept her gaze for a moment. Then he sat as well, shedding his tuxedo jacket, following her gaze across the water.

            It took her a while to speak. While he waited for her, he picked up a smooth stone and skipped it across the water, watching it sink. In his head he imagined he could hear Tom playing the piano, _Gaspard de la nuit_ , the story of the beautiful, treacherous woman of the lake.

            “Nabil,” she said, a smile on her face when she looked at him. “You know I just realized that you never did tell me the story of how you lost your leg.”

            No, he hadn’t. He hadn’t told anyone, not in this world anyway.

            Sometimes the thought had occurred to Nabil that his universe and Tallie’s weren’t that different, in the long run. Gotham was mostly the same, as was the Manor, up to where his favorite - his father’s favorite - Damian’s favorite - book was kept on the shelves. The people were different, he supposed. As far as he knew there had been no Ellen Nayar where he came from, although it was probably likely that she had been out there somewhere, with a daughter named Natalia. Damian Wayne looked the same in both universes, except for maybe his own father’s nose had been broken so many times that it never quite set right, and he had not cared enough to get it cosmetically fixed. That was something that seemed unlike the Damian Wayne of Tallie’s world.

            But those were superficial differences. The people were different, but not by much. The thought hurt him to say.

            He didn’t want to tell Tallie about the humiliation of his first night on patrol, about a mistake that had left him, helpless and bleeding, to be rescued by a father with a hard, vacant look in his eye, a father who had spent years training him to be Robin only to see him fail in his first few hours. It was not, perhaps, the sting of the humiliation itself that kept him quiet: it was the overwhelming, drowning fear that filled his lungs, the terrible possibility that his father and Tallie’s were not so different after all, the possibility that both Damians had hated him so much, had been disappointed in him up until their dying days.

            “It’s okay,” said Tallie. “You don’t have to tell me.”

            The sun dipped below the horizon, and Tallie reached out her feet, laying them on the damp sand at the edge of the lake.

            “You know what it means, don’t you?” she asked quietly.

            “What means?”

            “Daddy’s death,” she continued, “and the fact that nobody’s taken responsibility for it.”

            Nabil did not know what she meant. Not at first.

            “It means,” she began, her words careful and measured, so unlike the reckless way she usually spoke, a carelessness passed down through her father’s line, “that the Demon’s Head is unclaimed. And I am my father’s last remaining heir.”

            _Untrue_ , Nabil wanted to say, knowing that the blood in his veins was more Wayne than hers. But he did not say this. “That’s no way to honor him, Tallie,” he told her. “He never wanted that title in the first place.”

            “I know,” she replied, “that’s the difference between him and me, Nabil. He wasted it. I’m going to use it.”

            He could think of nothing to say to this, so he did not speak. As the moon rose and the stars began to peek through the inky night sky, she reached out and took his hand.

            “Nabil,” she began. Her voice seemed far away. “Have you ever thought about what it’d be like to leave, and never come back?”

            “Yes,” was the easy answer, but he did not say that. It was true that he had thought about leaving, about disappearing, about running away from the Waynes and their complications, from Damian’s disappointment and his own insecurities. But the reality was that he did not belong in this world, and wherever he was, he would not belong.

            Except for with Tallie.

            While Tallie gazed up at the stars, Nabil gazed at her. He wished he had not lost his world, but he could not pretend that he was not grateful every day for a love like Tallie. If it had not been for her, he would have left a long time ago. So maybe the answer was easy.

            “Yes,” he said, knowing that if she left, he could not bear to do anything but follow her. “I think about it every day, Tallie.”

            Tearing her gaze away from the constellations, Tallie looked at Nabil, and smiled.

            Soft as the water of the lake gently lapping at the shore, Tallie asked him: “What’s stopping us?”


End file.
